Unwanted bulk e-mail is a significant problem in the Internet community. It wastes a significant amount of time for users of e-mail systems, and it adds to Internet congestion problems by consuming large amounts of storage space and bandwidth.
Because of extremely low cost of bulk e-mail compared with other marketing strategies, such mail is not usually narrowly focussed to special audiences and results in large numbers of e-mail recipients getting messages in which they have no interest. Bulk e-mail companies thus tend to build and release mailing lists of e-mail addresses and use those lists to send messages with little discrimination or protection of the recipient's rights, desires or needs.
There have been unsatisfactory prior art attempts to eliminate unwanted bulk e-mail such as by blocking mail received from e-mail addresses known to be those of bulk marketers. However, alternative addresses may be adopted to defeat this solution. Another such attempt to block e-mail depends upon additional characters added to e-mail addresses which can be distinguished to sort out some bulk e-mail.
In short, these schemes have not been successful in the long term and in the short term are only partly successful in avoiding the bulk e-mail deliveries.
Attempts to work with filters for sorting out source addresses of bulk e-mail distributors have not proved successful, and require a heavy monitoring burden to keep bulk mailer listings up to date. Similarly those who try to sort out by key words can only in part be successful, particularly since new mailers and new messages may avoid those key words. Also this technique cannot readily be automated to omit manual appraisal and intervention.
Such suggestions as found in U.S. Pat. No. 5,619,648 put the burden upon the sender to specify more limited classes of recipients. This requires knowledge of a recipient's operations or e-mail habits and is difficult to update and monitor, even if the senders were motivated to try to reduce mailings to non-interested parties. In particular such operations add to the cost of sending effective e-mail more than the cost of random distributions to general e-mail addresses that could reach a much smaller target audience.
Accordingly this invention has as its objective the introduction of an effective way of eliminating unwanted bulk e-mail to significantly improve the internet communication process in a manner that puts little burden upon either the e-mail sender or recipient to improve the system. The "chaff" problem in cyberspace now termed a "SPAM" problem has been identified in national publications as the single largest problem confronting the Internet community.
One of the problems of prior art systems is that the cure may be worse than the disease. The intrusion of filters that must process the entire stream of e-mail is apt to cause bottlenecks that themselves reduce the communication efficiency.
This invention therefore has the further objectives of being able to process large quantities of e-mail flow without interruption, and to provide a simple foolproof process that is highly effective to eliminate the "chaff" without damaging the "wheat".